Tell us about Gaep.
Gaep is a contemporary art gallery with a vibrant programme featuring the work of established and emerging artists. Founded in 2014, the gallery was initially named Eastwards Prospectus and focused on artistic practices from Eastern Europe. In 2019, it changed its name in Gaep to become consistent with the new international nature of the programme, a result of the connections established over time with the international milieu of contemporary art. The current programme includes artistic practices that reflect various sociopolitical contexts and different generational positions, in an attempt to transcend established borders and circulate artworks and ideas in new ways. Awards and nominations include: Radio România Cultural Award 2020 for Marilena Preda Sânc’s exhibition Subjective (De)Constructions, Opening Prize at ARCOmadrid 2019 with Ištvan Išt Huzjan, and Special Mention Sardi per l’Arte Back to the Future at Artissima 2017 with Marilena Preda Sânc.
What do you have upcoming?
Gaep presents Răzvan Anton: Fading Studies (28 February – 12 April 2025), an exhibition of new works rooted in a family collection of images: 8mm footage shot by the artist’s father during the 1970s and 1980s. This material prompts both a significant body of new sun prints and a two-channel video, Archival Study (Places and Portraits), that will be featured in the exhibition. This is the artist’s third solo show with Gaep. After having worked for several years with public archives such as the Minerva Press Photo Archive, Răzvan Anton began in 2022 to look at his family’s collection. The works in the exhibition exemplify this change in his practice. Nonetheless, he continues to use a heliographic technique in order to, somewhat paradoxically, excavate a hidden meaning from the surface of old images. Anton starts by hatching perforated paper sheets with a blue ball pen, then places a transparent screen with the negative of the found image on them. Finally, he puts the layered sheets on the windows of his studio and lets the sun print the image through a slow process that takes weeks or months, depending on the season. Originating from the same family collection, the video Archival Study (Places and Portraits) loops digitized and edited 8mm footage. The artist treated this private material in a similar fashion to the public archive he had worked with before. Just like an archivist who classifies and labels, he organized sequences from his father’s footage into two categories: places and portraits. “Echoing the questions posed in his Minerva sun prints, this work extends Anton’s investigation – or study – into the moving image, focusing on its pictorial taxonomy, attention economy, and the superimposition of the two contrasting authorships. However, it yields a somewhat different result. By applying a classification strategy based on keywords – places and portraits – to home films (precursors to home videos), in other words, to footage that captures the spontaneity of life in its raw, amalgamated form, Anton’s work suggests the impossibility of truly isolating his subjects from their context through linguistic and rather mild formal interventions alone. Though edited in the framework of his study, these glimpses of landscapes, gardens, homes, bodies, and (mostly smiling) faces from his father’s footage remain part of the same disordered, convoluted lived reality.” (Mihaela Chiriac, excerpt from the curatorial text)
